I am Lying Now
I hope you enjoy.
Be weary of writers, for they are liars. They’re often the best kind due to the fact that their craft depends much on the power of their imagination, and in order for imagination to thrive then its bearer must hold it with some degree of faith and assurance of it being true, even if it’s all make-believe. A lie, when believed in enough, becomes the truth. Then again, the following statement is true: the preceeding statements are false.
The mind plays tricks on the heart on an almost daily basis. In many ways, the brain is to angels to what the heart is to devils; this is why a lot of people tend to think so much about doing something they want to do that they never get around to it. Angels and their false sense of security are limiting you. Don’t let them. Letting the resulting fear to take risks and live is as counter-productive as chasing your own tail or sitting through a movie you don’t like: fruitless endeavours that always end with mild dizzyness and a peculiar smell of shit.
Last night I had a dream. In it, I was saving a little girl from the clutches of what seemed like half the world. They wanted to kill her, but my inner devil wouldn’t let me stand by and let it happen so I put her in my apparently-flying car and took off. We were being chased for what seemed like an eternity and no matter how close they’d get to catching up with us I’d find a way to outsmart them. Eventually I managed to get rid of all of them and put her in a safehouse full of books. I closed the door behind me but instead of it being the outside of the place like when I first arrived with the girl, it was the inside of a hotel room where this very violent Chinese couple were staying. They were looking for the girl, too. The angel kept telling me that this wasn’t worth getting killed for but I am powered by blood, guts and glory, so the devil wins. Next thing I know, the chinese guy has his knife threatening my neck while the kitchen knife on my left hand threatened to shove itself into his right earlobe; the chinese woman was directly in front of me, her knife on my temple and all I could think then was how much worse her breath would smell if I didn’t have my butterfly knife in her mouth, aiming with the intent to impale her brain from underneath it. We were all nervous. I actually thought I had a chance of getting out of it alive, and then I woke up. The weirdest thing is I kept trying to fall asleep to see if I could go back, partly because I wanted to see if I could get out of it and partly because I had a deathwish. The angel’s cramping my style. Don’t ever watch a Harry Potter film and go to sleep upset a few hours afterwards.
Here’s the 50 best music videos of 2006. Here’s what the Marvel and DC universes would look like if they were all Peanuts characters. The new trailer to “300.” The Circle Hand Game. Balls.
I hate it when people figuratively shrug their shoulders by saying “nothing is safe.” “Everyone’s scared.” “It happens to everyone.” “That’s life.” “I do that to everyone.” “Tough break, it is what it is.” “Everyone does it.” Fuck you. That’s the most defeatist, downright irresponsible thing anyone could ever tell me. I don’t want to know how scared “everyone” is. I don’t want to know about “everyone.” I am not everyone. Hell, you are not everyone. Generalizing like that can be insulting when put in a particular light, and sadly that light has me in its crosshairs. It leads me to believe that fear makes people particularly good with deflecting issues by spreading the blame for their own shotcommings with the rest of humanity. News flash: not everyone is as scared as you are. exhibit one? Me.
I’m a little upset that out of my top 12 posts, the first 8 are not safe for work. I had no idea people still gave a shit about Britney Spears, so much so that looking at pictures of her vagina would be so appealing in 2006. In 2003 it would’ve been a different case altogether but today it just boggles the mind. I also like the word “muff” very much. It’s le funny. Speaking of muff, I just saw a girl pass by and I think I know her from somewhere. I can’t quite put my finger on it though because I mostly saw her in rooms with very little lighting and when I’m in places like that (mostly clubs) my vision pigeon-holes. I need to be smacked or slapped in order for me to acknowledge someone there. I’m usually just too into the music or my own crazy thoughts to care about who’s there and who isn’t. Also, I’m usually drunk in these places so my memory gets shot very often. I should ask her if I know her from somewhere. Hmm.
Change is always scary. I’ve noticed that it tends to paralyze a lot of people, and the changes they’ve gone through most of their lives have been so because life made the the decision for them instead of them doing so out of their own free will. My problem is I depend too much on people making the daring choice when most of the time they like to feel safe in what they have established. But then again, “nothing is safe.” If nothing is safe, then why stay where you are now? You could be doing incredible things and instead you’re there, spreading the blame of your shortcommings with the rest of the world. You’re an idiot. Suddenly, I love you a little less.
People are so quick to find things they don’t like about each other, but in contrast it takes a while for good relationships to flourish. It should be the other way around. Love is a lie, but it’s so great that we choose to ignore that nugget of information, and if you believe in something you know is false long enough, it becomes the truth. Your brain tells you that it’s impossible to be selfish while being selfless at the same time; as a result, people are quick to disregard something like love as it’s simply not possible to them. They’re too scared to think about it too much because of what they might find. The angel at work. Here’s a tip: don’t listen to the angel. He’s a pussy and is stupid. If your brain really is the ruling party here and it tells you that there’s no other way out of a pickle other than being rational then please try to digest this sentence: this statement is false. So simple. So irrational, yet at the same time making perfect sense. Every time you read it, a parallel universe dies.
Just like a paradox, all of the ideas expressed here seem to be highly contradictory. This is what life is: a chaotic series of unrelated events that are united by a connecting thread of thoughts and experiences stemmed from the choices we make. With so much uncertainty to throw around then, what’s the point of feeling safe? I can’t believe all of this came out of a simple phone call that, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have made. Bad choice? Perhaps. But if I hadn’t made the call I wasn’t going to make in the first place, would I have really avoided jumping into the state of mind I’m in today?
The problem of the paradox is that it seems to show that common beliefs about truth and falsity actually lead to a contradiction. Sentences can be constructed that cannot consistently be assigned a truth value even though they are completely in accord with grammar and semantic rules. Consider the simplest version of the paradox, the sentence This statement is false. If we suppose that the statement is true, everything asserted in it must be true. However, because the statement asserts that it is itself false, it must be false. So the hypothesis that it is true leads to the contradiction that it is true and false. Yet we cannot conclude that the sentence is false for that hypothesis also leads to contradiction. If the statement is false, then what it says about itself is not true. It says that it is false, so that must not be true. Hence, it is true. Under either hypothesis, we end up concluding that the statement is both true and false. But it has to be either true or false (or so our common intuitions lead us to think), hence there seems to be a contradiction at the heart of our beliefs about truth and falsity.
However, the fact that the liar sentence can be shown to be true if it is false and false if it is true has led some to conclude that it is neither true nor false. This response to the paradox is, in effect, to reject one of our common beliefs about truth and falsity: the claim that every statement has to be one or the other. This common belief is called the Principle of Bivalence, and is related to the law of the excluded middle.
The proposal that the statement is neither true nor false has given rise to the following, strengthened version of the paradox:
- This statement is not true.
If it is neither true nor false, then it is not true, which is what it says; hence it’s true, etc.
I’m going to go home now. When I do, I will watch “The Getaway,” starring Steve McQueen. I take it the movie will be great. Then I will sleep and hope the day fast forwards faster to Sunday morning when things will be much easier to say. Looking for diversions to pass the time while I lie and wait for things I have been going out there to find.
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